Wednesday, March 23. 2016

Note: to put things in perspective, especially in the private-public data debate, it is interesting to start digg into the history of privacy, or how, where and when it possibly came from... So as how, where and when it will possibly vanish...

The following article was found on Medium, written by journalist Greg Ferenstein. It has some flaws (or rather some quick shortcuts due to its format) and seems driven by the statement that the natural state of human beings is "transparency/no privacy", but it also doesn't pretend to be a scientific final story about privacy. It is rather instead a point of view and a relatively brief introduction by a writer, considering the large period adressed (to start digg in then). It is not a detailed paper by an historian specialized into this topic.

The article should be taken with a bit of critical distance therefore. Especially, to my reader's point of view, there are missing arguments regarding the fact that "privacy" is obviously not mainly "physical privacy" (walls, curtains, etc.), or not anymore for a long time. It certainly started as physical privacy -- as the author demonstrates it well -- but at a critcal point, this gained privacy, this evolution from a state of "no privacy" helped guarantee a certain freedom of thinking that became therefore highly related to the foundation of our "democratic" political system, to the "enlightenment" period as well.

And this is the main element regarding this question according to me. Loosing one could also clearly mean loosing the other... (if it's not already lost... a subject that could be debated as well, not to speculate further to know if a different system could emerge from this nor not, maybe even an "egalitarian" one).

Also, to state as a conclusion (last 7 lines) that our "natural state" is to be "transparent" (state of no privacy) and that the actual move toward "transparency" is just a manner to go "naturally" back to what it always was is a bit intellectually lazy: the current "transparency" that is pushed mainly by big corporations and also by States for security reasons --as stated, "law enforcements" of many sorts-- is not the old "passive" transparency but a highly "dynamic", computed, processed, and often merchandised one.

It has nothing to do with the old "all the family lives naked with their nurturing animals in the same room" sort of argument then... It is a different system, not democratc anymore but a mix of ultra liberalism and monitored surveillance. Not a funny thing at all...

So, all in all, the arguments in the article remain very interesting, related to many contemporary issues and there are several useful resources as well in there. But you should definitely keep your brain "switch on" while reading it!

- Humans do have an instinctual desire for privacy. However, for 3,000 years, cultures have nearly always prioritized convenience and wealth over privacy.

- Section II will show how cutting edge health technology will force people to choose between an early, costly death and a world without any semblance of privacy. Given historical trends, the most likely outcome is that we will forgo privacy and return to our traditional, transparent existence.

*This post is part of an online book about Silicon Valley’s Political endgame. See all available chapters here.

SECTION I:

How privacy was invented slowly over 3,000 years

“Privacy may actually be an anomaly” ~ Vinton Cerf, Co-creator of the military’s early Internet prototype and Google executive.

Cerf suffered a torrent of criticism in the media for suggesting that privacy is unnatural. Though he was simply opining on what he believed was an under-the-radar gathering at the Federal Trade Commission in 2013, historically speaking, Cerf is right.

Privacy, as it is conventionally understood, is only about 150 years old. Most humans living throughout history had little concept of privacy in their tiny communities. Sex, breastfeeding, and bathing were shamelessly performed in front of friends and family.

The lesson from 3,000 years of history is that privacy has almost always been a back-burner priority. Humans invariably choose money, prestige or convenience when it has conflicted with a desire for solitude.

"Because hunter-gatherer children sleep with their parents, either in the same bed or in the same hut, there is no privacy. Children see their parents having sex. In the Trobriand Islands, Malinowski was told that parents took no special precautions to prevent their children from watching them having sex: they just scolded the child and told it to cover its head with a mat" - UCLA Anthropologist, Jared Diamond

While extremely rare in tribal societies, privacy may, in fact, be instinctive. Evidence from tribal societies suggests that humans prefer to make love in solitude (In 9 of 12 societies where homes have separate bedrooms for parents, people prefer to have sex indoors. In those cultures without homes with separate rooms, sex is more often preferred outdoors).

However, in practice, the need for survival often eclipses the desire for privacy. For instance, among the modern North American Utku’s, a desire for solitude can seem profoundly rude:

"It dawned on me how forlorn I would be in the wildness if they forsook me. Far, far better to suffer loss of privacy” - Anthropologist Jean Briggs, on being ostracized by her host Utku family, after daring to explore the wilderness alone for a day.

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The big question: if privacy isn’t the norm, where did it start? Let’s start from the first cities:

Ancient Cities (6th Century B.C. — 4th Century AD)

Image: Roman citizens engaged in conversation in a public restroom. Credit: A Day In The Life Of Ancient Rome

Like their tribal ancestors, the Greeks displayed some preference for privacy. And, unlike their primitive ancestors, the Greeks had the means to do something about it. University of Leicester’ Samantha Burke found that the Greeks used their sophisticated understanding of geometry to create housing with the mathematically minimum exposure to public view while maximizing available light.

“For where men conceal their ways from one another in darkness rather than light, there no man will ever rightly gain either his due honour or office or the justice that is befitting” - Socrates

Athenian philosophy proved far more popular than their architecture. In Greece’s far less egalitarian successor, Rome, the landed gentry built their homes with wide open gardens. Turning one’s house into a public museum was an ostentatious display of wealth. Though, the rich seemed self-aware of their unfortunate trade-off:

“Great fortune has this characteristic, that it allows nothing to be concealed, nothing hidden; it opens up the homes of princes, and not only that but their bedrooms and intimate retreats, and it opens up and exposes to talk all the arcane secrets” ~ Pliny the Elder, ‘The Natural History’, circa 77 A.D

The majority of Romans lived in crowded apartments, with walls thin enough to hear every noise. “Think of Ancient Rome as a giant campground,” writes Angela Alberto in A Day in the life of Ancient Rome.

Early Christian saints pioneered the modern concept of privacy: seclusion. The Christian Bible popularized the idea that morality was not just the outcome of an evil deed, but the intent to cause harm; this novel coupling of intent and morality led the most devout followers (monks) to remove themselves from society and focus obsessively on battling their inner demons free from the distractions of civilization.

“Just as fish die if they stay too long out of water, so the monks who loiter outside their cells or pass their time with men of the world lose the intensity of inner peace. So like a fish going towards the sea, we must hurry to reach our cell, for fear that if we delay outside we will lost our interior watchfulness” - St Antony of Egypt

It is rumored that on the island monastery of Nitria, a monk died and was found 4 days later. Monks meditated in isolation in stone cubicles, known as “Beehive” huts.

In 1215, the influential Fourth Council Of Lateran (the “Great Council”) declared that confessions should be mandatory for the masses. This mighty stroke of Catholic power instantly extended the concept of internal morality to much of Europe.

“The apparatus of moral governance was shifted inward, to a private space that no longer had anything to do with the community,” explained religious author, Peter Loy. Solitude had a powerful ally.

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Fortunately for the church, some new technology would make quiet contemplation much less expensive: Guttenberg’s printing press.

Thanks to the printing presses invention after the Great Counsel’s decree, personal reading supercharged European individualism. Poets, artists, and theologians were encouraged in their pursuits of “abandoning the world in order to turn one’s heart with greater intensity toward God,” so recommended the influential canon of The Brethren of the Common Life.

To be sure, up until the 18th century, public readings were still commonplace, a tradition that extended until universal book ownership. Quiet study was an elite luxury for many centuries.

Citizens enjoy a public reading.

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The Architecture of privacy

Individual beds are a modern invention. As one of the most expensive items in the home, a single large bed became a place for social gatherings, where guests were invited to sleep with the entire family and some servants.

People gather around a large bed.

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But, the uncleanness of urbanized life quickly caught up with the Europeans, when infectious diseases wiped out large swaths of newly crowded cities. The Black Death, alone, killed over 100 million people.

This profoundly changed hygiene attitudes, especially in hospitals, where it was once common for patients to sleep as close together as houseguests were accustomed to.

"Little children, both girls and boys, together in dangerous beds, upon which other patients died of contagious diseases, because there is no order and no private bed for the children, [who must] sleep six, eight, nine, ten, and twelve to a bed, at both head and foot" - notes of a nurse (circa 1500), lamenting the lack of modern medical procedures.

Though, just because individual beds in hospitals were coming into vogue, it did not mean that sex was any more private. Witnessing the consummation of marriage was common for both spiritual and logistical reasons:

“Newlyweds climbed into bed before the eyes of family and friends and the next day exhibit the sheets as proof that the marriage had been consummated” - Georges Duby, Editor, "A History of Private Life"

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Few people demanded privacy while they slept because even separate beds wouldn’t have afforded them the luxury. Most homes only had one room. Architectural historians trace the origins of internal walls to the more basic human desire to be warm.

Below, in the video, is a Hollywood re-enactment of couples sleeping around the burning embers of a central fire pit, from the film, Beowulf. It’s a solid illustration of the grand hall open architecture that was pervasive before the popularization of internal walls circa 1,400 A.D.

“Firstly, I propose that there be a room common to all in the middle, and at its centre there shall be a fire, so that many more people can get round it and everyone can see the others faces when engaging in their amusements and storytelling” - 15th century Italian Architect, Sebastian Serlio.

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To disperse heat more efficiently without choking houseguests to death, fire-resistant chimney-like structures were built around central fire pits to reroute smoke outside. Below is an image of a “transitional” house during the 16th century period when back-to-back fireplaces broke up the traditional open hall architecture.

“A profound change in the very blueprint of the living space” - historian Sarti Raffaella, on the introduction of the chimney.

Pre-industrial revolution (1600–1840) — The home becomes private, which isn’t very private

The first recorded daily diary was composed by Lady Margaret Hoby, who lived just passed the 16th century. On February 4th, 1600, she writes that she retired “to my Closit, wher I praid and Writt some thinge for mine owne priuat Conscience’s”.

By the renaissance, it was quite common for at least the wealthy to shelter themselves away in the home. Yet, even for those who could afford separate spaces, it was more logistically convenient to live in close quarters with servants and family.

“Having served in the capacity of manservant to his Excellency Marquis Francesco Albergati for the period of about eleven years, that I can say and give account that on three or four occasions I saw the said marquis getting out of bed with a perfect erection of the male organ” - 1751, Servant of Albergati Capacelli, testifying in court that his master did not suffer from incontinence, thus rebutting his wife’s legal suit for annulment.

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Law

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It was just prior to the industrial revolution that citizens, for the first time, demanded that the law begin to keep pace with the evolving need for secret activities.

In this early handwritten note on August 20th, 1770, revolutionist and future President of the United States, John Adams, voiced his support for the concept of privacy.

“I am under no moral or other Obligation…to publish to the World how much my Expences or my Incomes amount to yearly.”

Despite some high-profile opposition, the first American Census was posted publicly, for logistics reasons, more than anything else. Transparency was the best way to ensure every citizen could inspect it for accuracy.

Privacy-conscious citizen did find more traction with what would become perhaps America’s first privacy law, the 1710 Post Office Act, which banned sorting through the mail by postal employees.

“I’ll say no more on this head, but When I have the Pleasure to See you again, shall Inform you of many Things too tedious for a Letter and which perhaps may fall into Ill hands, for I know there are many at Boston who dont Scruple to Open any Persons letters, but they are well known here.” - Dr. Oliver Noyes, lamenting the well-known fact that mail was often read.

“The material and moral well-being of workers depend, the health of the public, and the security of society depend on each family’s living in a separate, healthy, and convenient home, which it may purchase” - speaker at 1876 international hygiene congress in Brussels.

For the poor, however, life was still very much on display. The famous 20th-century existentialist philosopher Jean Paul-Satre observed the poor streets of Naples:

Crowded apartment dwellers spill on to the streets

“The ground floor of every building contains a host of tiny rooms that open directly onto the street and each of these tiny rooms contains a family…they drag tables and chairs out into the street or leave them on the threshold, half outside, half inside…outside is organically linked to inside…yesterday i saw a mother and a father dining outdoors, while their baby slept in a crib next to the parents’ bed and an older daughter did her homework at another table by the light of a kerosene lantern…if a woman falls ill and stays in bed all day, it’s open knowledge and everyone can see her.”

Insides of houses were no less cramped:

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The “Right To Privacy “ is born

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“The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.” - “The Right To Privacy” ~ December 15, 1890, Harvard Law Review.

Interestingly enough, the right to privacy was justified on the very grounds for which it is now so popular: technology’s encroachment on personal information.

However, the father of the right to privacy and future Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, was ahead of his time. His seminal article did not get much press—and the press it did get wasn’t all that glowing.

"The feelings of these thin-skinned Americans are doubtless at the bottom of an article in the December number of the Harvard Law Review, in which two members of the Boston bar have recorded the results of certain researches into the question whether Americans do not possess a common-law right of privacy which can be successfully defended in the courts." - Galveston Daily News on ‘The Right To Privacy’

Privacy had not helped America up to this point in history. Brazen invasions into the public’s personal communications had been instrumental in winning the Civil War.

A request for wiretapping.

This is a letter from the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, requesting broad authority over telegraph lines; Lincoln simply scribbled on the back “The Secretary of War has my authority to exercise his discretion in the matter within mentioned. A. LINCOLN.”

It wasn’t until the industry provoked the ire of a different president that information privacy was codified into law. President Grover Cleveland had a wife who was easy on the eyes. And, easy access to her face made it ideal for commercial purposes.

The rampant use of President Grover Cleveland’s wife, Frances, on product advertisements, eventually led to the one of the nation’s first privacy laws. The New York legislature made it a penalty to use someone’s unauthorized likeness for commercial purposes in 1903, for a fine of up to $1,000.

Indeed, for most of the 19th century, privacy was practically upheld as a way of maintaining a man’s ownership over his wife’s public and private life — including physical abuse.

“We will not inflict upon society the greater evil of raising the curtain upon domestic privacy, to punish the lesser evil of trifling violence”- 1868, State V. Rhodes, wherein the court decided the social costs of invading privacy was not greater than that of wife beating.

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The Technology of Individualism

The first 150 years of American life saw an explosion of information technology, from the postcard to the telephone. As each new communication method gave a chance to peek at the private lives of strangers and neighbors, Americans often (reluctantly) chose whichever technology was either cheaper or more convenient.

Privacy was a secondary concern.

"There is a lady who conducts her entire correspondence through this channel. She reveals secrets supposed to be the most pro- found, relates misdemeanors and indiscretions with a reckless disregard of the consequences. Her confidence is unbounded in the integrity of postmen and bell-boys, while the latter may be seen any morning, sitting on the doorsteps of apartment houses, making merry over the post-card correspondence.” - Editor, the Atlantic Monthly, on Americas of love of postcards, 1905.

Even though postcards were far less private, they were convenient. More than 200,000 postcards were ordered in the first two hours they were offered in New York City, on May 15, 1873.

Source: American Privacy: The 400-year History of Our Most Contested Right

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The next big advance in information technology, the telephone, was a wild success in the early 20th century. However, individual telephone lines were prohibitively expensive; instead, neighbors shared one line, known as “party lines.” Commercial ads urged neighbors to use the shared technology with “courtesy”.

But, as this comic shows, it was common to eavesdrop.

“Party lines could destroy relationships…if you were dating someone on the party line and got a call from another girl, well, the jig was up. Five minutes after you hung up, everybody in the neighborhood — including your girlfriend — knew about the call. In fact, there were times when the girlfriend butted in and chewed both the caller and the callee out. Watch what you say.” - Author, Donnie Johnson.

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Where convenience and privacy found a happy co-existence, individualized gadgets flourished. Listening was not always an individual act. The sheer fact that audio was a form of broadcast made listening to conversations and music a social activity.

This all changed with the invention of the headphone.

“The triumph of headphones is that they create, in a public space, an oasis of privacy”- The Atlantic’s libertarian columnist, Derek Thompson.

Late 20th Century — Fear of a World Without Privacy

By the 60's, individualized phones, rooms, and homes became the norm. 100 years earlier, when Lincoln tapped all telegraph lines, few raised any questions. In the new century, invasive surveillance would bring down Lincoln’s distant successor, even though his spying was far less pervasive.

Upon entering office, the former Vice-President assured the American people that their privacy was safe.

“As Vice President, I addressed myself to the individual rights of Americans in the area of privacy…There will be no illegal tappings, eavesdropping, bugging, or break-ins in my administration. There will be hot pursuit of tough laws to prevent illegal invasions of privacy in both government and private activities.” - Gerald Ford.

Justice Brandeis had finally won

2,000 A.D. and beyond — a grand reversal

In the early 2,000s, young consumers were willing to purchase a location tracking feature that was once the stuff of 1984 nightmares.

“The magic age is people born after 1981…That’s the cut-off for us where we see a big change in privacy settings and user acceptance.” - Loopt Co-Founder Sam Altman, who pioneered paid geo-location features.

The older generations’ fear of transparency became a subject of mockery.

“My grandma always reminds me to turn my GPS off a few blocks before I get home “so that the man giving me directions doesn’t know where I live.” - a letter to the editor of College Humor’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand” series.

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Increased urban density and skyrocketing rents in the major cities has put pressure on communal living.

A co-living space in San Francisco / Source: Sarah Buhr, TechCrunch

“We’re seeing a shift in consciousness from hyper-individualistic to more cooperative spaces…We have a vision to raise our families together.” - Jordan Aleja Grader, San Francisco resident

At the more extreme ends, a new crop of so-called “life bloggers” publicize intimate details about their days:

Blogger Robert Scoble takes A picture with Google Glass in the shower

At the edges of transparency and pornography, anonymous exhibitionism finds a home on the web, at the wildly popular content aggregator, Reddit, in the aptly titled community “Gone Wild”.

SECTION II:

How privacy will again fade away

For 3,000 years, most people have been perfectly willing to trade privacy for convenience, wealth or fame. It appears this is still true today.

AT&T recently rolled out a discounted broadband internet service, where customers could pay a mere $30 more a month to not have their browsing behavior tracked online for ad targeting.

“Since we began offering the service more than a year ago the vast majority have elected to opt-in to the ad-supported model.” - AT&T spokeswoman Gretchen Schultz (personal communication)

Performance artist Risa Puno managed to get almost half the attendees at an Brooklyn arts festival to trade their private data (image, fingerprints, or social security number) for a delicious cinnamon cookie. Some even proudly tweeted it out.

Even for holdouts, the costs of privacy may be too great to bear. With the advance of cutting-edge health technologies, withholding sensitive data may mean a painful, early death.

For instance, researchers have already discovered that if patients of the deadly Vioxx drug had shared their health information publicly, statisticians could have detected the side effects earlier enough to save 25,000 lives.

As a result, Google’s Larry Page has embarked on a project to get more users to share their private health information with the academic research community. While Page told a crowd at the TED conference in 2013 that he believe such information can remain anonymous, statisticians are doubtful.

"We have been pretending that by removing enough information from databases that we can make people anonymous. We have been promising privacy, and this paper demonstrates that for a certain percent of a population, those promises are empty”- John Wilbanks of Sage Bionetworks, on a new academic paper that identified anonymous donors to a genetics database, based on public information

Speaking as a statistician, it is quite easy to identify people in anonymous datasets. There are only so many 5'4" jews living in San Francisco with chronic back pain. Every bit of information we reveal about ourselves will be one more disease that we can track, and another life saved.

If I want to know whether I will suffer a heart attack, I will have to release my data for public research. In the end, privacy will be an early death sentence.

Already, health insurers are beginning to offer discounts for people who wear health trackers and let others analyze their personal movements. Many, if not most, consumers in the next generation will choose cash and a longer life in exchange for publicizing their most intimate details.

What can we tell with basic health information, such as calories burned throughout the day? Pretty much everything.

With a rudimentary step and calorie counter, I was able to distinguish whether I was having sex or at the gym, since the minute-by-minute calorie burn profile of sex is quite distinct (the image below from my health tracker shows lots of energy expended at the beginning and end, with few steps taken. Few activities besides sex have this distinct shape)

More advanced health monitors used by insurers are coming, like embedded sensors in skin and clothes that detect stress and concentration. The markers of an early heart attack or dementia will be the same that correspond to an argument with a spouse or if an employee is dozing off at work.

No behavior will escape categorization—which will give us unprecedented superpowers to extend healthy life. Opting out of this tracking—if it is even possible—will mean an early death and extremely pricey health insurance for many.

If history is a guide, the costs and convenience of radical transparency will once again take us back to our roots as a species that could not even conceive of a world with privacy.

It’s hard to know whether complete and utter transparency will realize a techno-utopia of a more honest and innovative future. But, given that privacy has only existed for a sliver of human history, it’s disappearance is unlikely to doom mankind. Indeed, transparency is humanity’s natural state.

Monday, April 27. 2015

Note: we often complain on this blog about the centralization in progress (through the actions of corporations) within the "networked world", which is therefore less and less "horizontal" or distributed (and then more pyramidal, proprietary, etc.)

Here comes an interesting initiative by BitTorrent, following their previous distributed file storage/"cloud" system (Sync): a new browser, Maelstrom. This is interesting indeed, because instead of the "web image" --indexed web content-- being hosted in proprietary servers (i.e. the ones of Google), so as your browsing history and everything else, it seems that it will distribute this "web image" on as many "personal" devices as possible. Keeping it fully decentralized therefore. Well... let's wait and see, as the way it will really work has not been explained very well so far (we can speculate that the copy of the content will be distributed indeed, but we don't know much about their business model --what about the metadata aggregated by all the user's web searches and usages? this could still be centralized... Yet note even so they state that it will not be).

Undoubtedly, the BitTorrent architecture is an interesting one when it comes to speak about networked content and decentralization. Yet it is now also a big company... with several venture capital partners (including the ones of Facebook, Spotify, Dropbox, Jawbone, etc.). "Techno-capitalism" (as Eric Sadin names it) is unfortunately one of the biggest force of centralization and commodification. So this is a bit puzzling, but let's not be pessimistic and trust their words for now, until we don't?

Back in December, we reported on the alpha for BitTorrent’s Maelstrom, a browser that uses BitTorrent’s P2P technology in order to place some control of the Web back in users’ hands by eliminating the need for centralized servers.

Maelstrom is now in beta, bring it one step closer to official release. BitTorrent says more than 10,000 developers and 3,500 publishers signed up for the alpha, and it’s using their insights to launch a more stable public beta.

Along with the beta comes the first set of developer tools for the browser, helping publishers and programmers to build their websites around Maelstrom’s P2P technology. And they need to – Maelstrom can’t decentralize the Internet if there isn’t any native content for the platform.

It’s only available on Windows at the moment but if you’re interested and on Microsoft’s OS, you can download the beta from BitTorrent now.

Data dump: New software from Bittorrent can synchronize files between computers and mobile devices without ever storing them in a data center like this one.

The debate over how much we should trust cloud companies with our data (see “NSA Spying Is Making Us Less Safe”) was reawakened last year after revelations that the National Security Agency routinely harvests data from Internet companies including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Facebook.

Bittorrent, the company behind the sometimes controversial file-sharing protocol of the same name, is hoping that this debate will drive adoption of its new file-syncing technology this year. Called Bittorrent Sync, it synchronizes folders and files on different computers and mobile devices in a way that’s similar to what services like Dropbox offer, but without ever copying data to a central cloud server.

Cloud-based file-syncing services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s SkyDrive route all data via their own servers and keep a copy of it there. The Bittorrent software instead has devices contact one another directly over the Internet to update files as they are added or changed.

That difference in design means that people using Bittorrent Sync don’t have to worry about whether the cloud company hosting their data is properly securing it against rogue employees or other threats.

Forgoing the cloud also means that data shared using Bittorrent Sync could be harvested by the NSA or another agency only by going directly to the person or company controlling the synced devices. Synced data does travel over the public Internet, where it might be intercepted by a surveillance agency such as the NSA, which is known to collect data directly from the Internet backbone, but it travels in a strongly encrypted form. One drawback of Bittorrent Sync’s design is that two devices must both be online at the same time for them to synchronize, since there’s no intermediary server to act as an always-on source.

Bittorrent Sync is available now as a free download for PCs and mobile devices, but in a beta version that lacks the polish and ease of use of many consumer applications. Bittorrent CEO Eric Klinker says the next version, due this spring, will feature major upgrades to the interface that will make the software more user friendly and in line with its established cloud-based competitors.

Klinker says Bittorrent Sync shows how popular applications of the Internet can be designed in a way that gives people control of their own data, despite prevailing trends. “Pick any app on the Web today, it could be Twitter, e-mail, search, and it has been developed in a very centralized way—those businesses are built around centralizing information on their servers,” he says. “I’m trying to put more power in the hands of the end user and less in the hands of these companies and other centralizing authorities.”

Anonymous data sent back to Bittorrent by its software indicates that more than two million people are already using it each month. Some of those people have found uses that go beyond just managing files. For example, the company says one author in Beijing uses Bittorrent Sync to distribute blog posts on topics sensitive with Chinese authorities. And one U.S. programmer built a secure, decentralized messaging system on top of the software.

Klinker says that companies are also starting to use Bittorrent Sync to keep data inside their own systems or to avoid the costs of cloud-based solutions. He plans to eventually make Bittorrent Sync pay for itself by finding a way to sell extra services to corporate users of the software.

Given its emphasis on transparency and data ownership, Bittorrent has been criticized by some for not releasing the source code for its application. Some in the tech- and privacy-savvy crowd attracted by Bittorrent Sync’s decentralized design say this step is necessary if people are to be sure that no privacy-compromising bugs or backdoors are hiding in the software.

Klinker says he understands those concerns and may yet decide to release the source code for the software. “It’s a fair point, and we understand that transparency is good, but it opens up vulnerabilities, too,” he says. For now the company prefers to keep the code private and perform security audits behind closed doors, says Klinker.

Jacob Williams, a digital forensic scientist with CSR Group, says that stance is defensible, although he generally considers open-source programs to be more secure than those that aren’t. “Open source is a double-edged sword,” says Williams, because finding subtly placed vulnerabilities is very challenging, and because open-source projects can be split off into different versions, which dilutes the number of people looking at any one version.

Williams’s own research has shown how Dropbox and similar services could be used to slip malicious software through corporate firewalls because they are configured to use the same route as Web traffic, which usually gets a free pass (see “Dropbox Can Sync Malware”). Bittorrent Sync is configured slightly differently, he says, and so likely doesn’t automatically open up an open channel to the Internet. However, “Bittorrent Sync will likely require changes to the firewall in any moderately secure network,” he notes.

Wednesday, October 16. 2013

arkOS is an open source project designed to let its users take control of their personal data and make running a home server as easy as using a PC

At the start of this year, analyst firm Gartner predicted that over the next four years a total of US$677 billion would be spent on cloud services. The growth of 'things-as-a-service' is upending enterprise IT and creating entirely new, innovative business models. At the same time, social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have built massive user bases, and created databases that are home to enormous amounts of information about account holders.

Collectively, all of this means that people's data, and the services they use with it, are more likely than ever to be found outside of home PCs and other personal devices, housed in servers that they will probably never likely to see let alone touch. But, when everything is delivered as a service, people's control and even ownership of their data gets hazy to say the least.

Earlier this year NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden offered some insight – in revelations that probably surprised few but still outraged many – into the massive level of data collection and analysis carried out by state actors.

arkOS is not a solution to the surveillance state, but it does offer an alternative to those who would rather exercise some measure of control over their data and, at the very least, not lock away their information in online services where its retrieval and use is at the whim of a corporation, not the user.

arkOS is a Linux-based operating system currently in alpha created by Jacob Cook and the CitizenWeb Project. It's designed to run on a Raspberry Pi – a super-low-cost single board computer – and ultimately will let users, even of the non-technical variety, run from within their homes email, social networking, storage and other services that are increasingly getting shunted out into the cloud.

CitizenWeb Project

Cook is the founder of the CitizenWeb Project, whose goal is to promote a more decentralised and democratic Internet

"It does this by encouraging developers that work on tools to these ends, offering an 'umbrella' to aid with management and publicity for these projects," Cook says

"Decentralisation rarely gets any attention, even within the tech community, and it was even more obscure before the NSA scandal broke a few months ago," he adds.

The best way to promote decentralisation "is to provide great platforms with great experiences that can compete with those larger providers," Cook says

"This may seem like an impossible task for the open source development community, especially without the head start that the platforms have, but I believe it is entirely doable.

"We produce the best tools in the world – far better than any proprietary solutions can give – but there is a huge gap with these tools that the majority of the population cannot cross.

"When we tell them, 'oh, using this tool is as easy as installing a Python module on your computer,' for us geeks that is incredibly easy, but for most people, you lost them at the word Python and you will never get them back.

"So the momentum toward using centralised platforms will not relent until developers start making tools for a wider audience. Experience and usability is every bit as important as features or functionality."

arkOS is the CitizenWeb Project's first major initiative but more are on the way. "There are quite a few planned that have nothing to do with arkOS," Cook says.

"I've been working on arkOS since about February of this year, which was a few months before the [NSA] revelations," Cook says.

The birth of arkOS

There were two things that spurred work on arkOS

"The first was my decision to set up my own home server to host all of my data a few years ago," Cook explains.

"I had a good deal of experience with Linux and system administration, but it still took a huge amount of time and research to get the services I wanted set up, and secured properly.

"This experience made me realise, if I have background in these things and it takes me so long to do it, it must be impossible for individuals who don't have the expertise and the time that I do to work things out."

The second was the push by corporations "to own every aspect of one's online life."

"Regardless of your personal feelings about Google, Facebook, etc., there have been countless examples of these services closing themselves off from each other, creating those 'walled gardens' that give them supreme control over your data," Cook says.

"This might not bother people, until we find out what we did from Snowden, that this data doesn't always rest with them and that as long as there is a single point of failure, you always have to rely on 'trusting' your provider.

"I don't know about you, but I wouldn't trust a company that is tasked to sell me things to act in my best interest."

"All that being said, the NSA revelations have really provided a great deal of interest to the project. In all of the networks and communities that I have been through since the scandal broke, people are clamouring for an easy way to self-host things at home. It shouldn't have to be rocket science. I hope that arkOS can represent part of the solution for them."

The aim of the project is an easy-to-use server operating system than can let people self-host their own services with the ease that someone might install a regular desktop application

"Hosting one's own websites, email, cloud data, etc. from home can be a very time-consuming and occasionally expensive endeavour," Cook says.

"Not to mention the fact that it takes a good amount of knowledge and practice to do properly and securely. arkOS lets you set up these systems just like you do on your home computer or your smartphone, when you install something from an app store. It 'just works' with minimal configuration.

"There is no good reason why server software shouldn't be able to have the same experience."

Making servers simple

The OS is "all about simplicity" straight out of the box, Cook says.

"For example, on the Raspberry Pi, hosting server software that routinely writes to log files can quickly wear out your SD card. So arkOS caches them in memory to make as few writes as possible, and it does this from its first boot."

The team is building a range of tools that make it easy to manage an arkOS server. These include Beacon, which lets users find other arkOS servers on a local network, and Genesis, a GUI management system for arkOS.

Genesis is the "most important part" of the OS, Cook says. "It's the tool that does all the heavy lifting for you – installing new apps and software with one click, automatically configuring security settings, giving wizards for navigating through lengthy setup [processes].

"The goal with Genesis is to allow you to do anything you want with your server in an easy and straightforward way, without even having to think about touching the command line. It runs locally on the arkOS server, accessible through the browser of your home computer."

There are more tools for arkOS on the way, Cook says.

"Any one of these tools can be made to work with other distros; the key is that they are available in the default working environment with no additional setup or bother on the user's part."

At the moment the system is still very much in alpha. "It is minimally stable and still getting most of its major features piled in," Cook says. Despite it being early days the reception so far has been "very positive".

"It's been downloaded several hundred times, ostensibly by intrepid people willing to try out the framework and see if they can produce bugs," he says.

At the moment, Cook is leading the arkOS project and also doing the bulk of the development work on Genesis.

"Aside from myself, there are other individuals who contribute features when they are able, like working on Deluge or putting together plugins to use with Genesis," he says.

He is interested in finding more people to help out with the components of arkOS, particularly with Python and Golang experience, which are being used extensively. He's also interested in sysadmins or Linux veterans to help manage repositories, with an to expanding the operating system to other architectures.

"Web design is also a big one, both for the Genesis front-end as well as our Web properties and outreach efforts. Even non-tech people can lend a hand with outreach, community support and the like. No offer of help will be refused so people can be in touch confidently," he adds.

Looking beyond alpha

arkOS is under active development but the OS is still at a "very experimental" stage. Most of Cook's time is spent working on frameworks for Genesis, with a goal of completing its major frameworks by the end of this year and releasing a beta of arkOS.

A major sub-project the team working on is called Deluge: A dynamic DNS service and port proxy for users who don't have access to their own domain name or static IPs.

"I am working on the security framework right now, allowing users to easily segment their services based on the zone that they should be available to. For example, you can set your ownCloud site that you run with arkOS to only be available on your home network, while your Jeykll blog should be available to everyone.

"Then comes the certificates system, easily making SSL certs available to your different applications."

"Beyond that, most of what I will be working on is plugins that do certain things. Email is a really big thing, something that nearly everyone who asks about arkOS is interested in self-hosting. With the NSA revelations it isn't hard to see why."

Other features to be included in arkOS include XMPP chat server hosting, Radicale (calendar/contacts hosting), automatic backups, internationalisation, Tor integration, "and much, much more."

Contact Rohan Pearce at rohan_pearce at idg.com.au or follow him on Twitter: @rohan_p

Tuesday, October 15. 2013

Ed. — Occupy.here was supported by Rhizome as part of its 2012 Commissions program, and also received a commission from Triple Canopy in 2013. The project's new website launched yesterday.

Regardless of your feelings about Occupy Wall Street, we can all agree that its genesis was unlikely, to say the least. It appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in New York's Financial District (of all places). And it continued to exist only because of a lucky break: basing the protests in Zuccotti Park, formerly Liberty Plaza Park, was a fallback plan, following a failed attempt to protest in front of the New York Stock Exchange. It was the unusual rules for Zuccotti—as a Privately Owned Public Space (POPS), it is not bound by the normal city parks curfew, and is required by charter to stay open 24 hours a day—that enabled the encampments to get a foothold. This may have been a lucky break, but one that was earned through years of organizing, cultivating the expertise and tools and networks that allow a movement to grow and sustain itself.

Occupy.here began two years ago as an experiment for the encampment at Zuccotti Park. It was a wifi router hacked to run OpenWrt Linux (an operating system mostly used for computer networking) and a small "captive portal" website. When users joined the wifi network and attempted to load any URL, they were redirected to http://occupy.here. The web software offered up a simple BBS-style message board providing its users with a space to share messages and files.

Unlike most wifi connections, this one wouldn't let you check your Facebook. It was designed to run entirely disconnected from the internet. Only people physically close enough to the router can could reach the local web forum with their mobile phone or laptop. I imagined it becoming a kind of intranet for Occupiers, filtering users by proximity to specifically support the people at the park.

During the Occupation, I was getting up extra early to visit the park on weekdays before work. I'd chat with whoever was awake and hear what was going on with the upcoming General Assembly, or who'd been making a ruckus the night before. When I described my strange wifi project, I was surprised at the encouraging reactions I got. "That's awesome, you should do it!" or "we were talking about building something like that—does it handle video?"

So I showed up one morning and left my first prototype with the volunteers at the Info desk. Just keeping the router powered consistently was a big challenge; I'd plug it into whichever diesel generator I could find running in the park. After the park was cleared, I refocused my thinking about how best to support a decentralized movement. Since then Occupy.here has become my zen garden, a tiny self-contained internet I've been developing slowly and methodically.

This past Spring, I began stashing wifi routers wherever I could find an electrical plug near a freely accessible space. For a few months, a friend hosted an Occupy.here router from his studio at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council residency in the One Liberty Plaza building. His 12th floor window looked down right onto Zuccotti Park, close enough to get two out of three bars of wifi coverage in the park.

In this second, decentralized phase, I've seen a modest volume of use by internet standards, perhaps a handful of posts per week. There are patterns in how it gets used according to where the router is situated. The Zuccotti Park router was a popular venue for middle-aged men to upload selfies. Another one, hidden in the lobby of the Museum of Modern Art (installed without permission), mostly receives multi-lingual variations on "hello world" or "why doesn't the wifi work?" A handful of users have written more substantially, but it amounts to a message in a bottle, floating in the 2.4 Ghz spectrum.

It's been exciting to see Occupy.here used "in the wild," but it also has some shortcomings—its lack of visibility makes discovering the network difficult, and the slim likelihood that a user will return makes conversations difficult to achieve. As a growing digital library, the project can surely offer an alternative to "junk food media," but building a slow web movement is not enough. I'd like for the project to be fun to use, but ultimately I'm interested in fostering conditions that might credibly challenge the status quo.

I need to destroy the zen garden and replace it with something more like a town square. Less tidy, more communal. I would like to create something you would want to use every day to share with people whose opinions matter to you. I'm interested in finding collaborators who have a stake in its development. It's becoming clear that, collectively, we all need online spaces that aren't undermined by the surveillance state.

Whether or not the big tent incarnation of Occupy has a future, the 99% are just as dissatisfied as we were in 2011. Much like Napster gave us a taste of what a digital commons could be, Occupy showed us how massively distributed activism can materialize seemingly overnight. It's time to put in the hard work organizing for the next Occupy, to create the right conditions for a lucky break.

On Sunday October 6th I'll be participating in the PRISM Breakup event at Eyebeam. I'll be conducting a hands-on workshop as 12:30pm, followed by a talk later in the afternoon. Please come with radical ideas, and bring a laptop!

Friday, September 14. 2012

Free services in exchange for personal information. That's the "privacy bargain" we all strike on the Web. It could be the worst deal ever.

By Cory Doctorow

Here's a story you've heard about the Internet: we trade our privacy for services. The idea is that your private information is less valuable to you than it is to the firms that siphon it out of your browser as you navigate the Web. They know what to do with it to turn it into value—for them and for you. This story has taken on mythic proportions, and no wonder, since it has billions of dollars riding on it.

But if it's a bargain, it's a curious, one-sided arrangement. To understand the kind of deal you make with your privacy a hundred times a day, please read and agree with the following:

By reading this agreement, you give Technology Review and its partners the unlimited right to intercept and examine your reading choices from this day forward, to sell the insights gleaned thereby, and to retain that information in perpetuity and supply it without limitation to any third party.

Actually, the text above is not exactly analogous to the terms on which we bargain with every mouse click. To really polish the analogy, I'd have to ask this magazine to hide that text in the margin of one of the back pages. And I'd have to end it with This agreement is subject to change at any time. What we agree to participate in on the Internet isn't a negotiated trade; it's a smorgasbord, and intimate facts of your life (your location, your interests, your friends) are the buffet.

Why do we seem to value privacy so little? In part, it's because we are told to. Facebook has more than once overridden the privacy preferences set by its users, replacing them with new system-wide defaults. Facebook then responds to the inevitable public outcry by restoring something that's like the old system, except slightly less private. And it adds a few more lines to an inexplicably complex privacy dashboard.

Even if you read the fine print, human beings are awful at pricing out the net present value of a decision whose consequences are far in the future. No one would take up smoking if the tumors sprouted with the first puff. Most privacy disclosures don't put us in immediate physical or emotional distress either. But given a large population making a large number of disclosures, harm is inevitable. We've all heard the stories about people who've been fired because they set the wrong privacy flag on that post where they blew off on-the-job steam.

The risks increase as we disclose more, something that the design of our social media conditions us to do. When you start out your life in a new social network, you are rewarded with social reinforcement as your old friends pop up and congratulate you on arriving at the party. Subsequent disclosures generate further rewards, but not always. Some disclosures seem like bombshells to you ("I'm getting a divorce") but produce only virtual cricket chirps from your social network. And yet seemingly insignificant communications ("Does my butt look big in these jeans?") can produce a torrent of responses. Behavioral scientists have a name for this dynamic: "intermittent reinforcement." It's one of the most powerful behavioral training techniques we know about. Give a lab rat a lever that produces a food pellet on demand and he'll only press it when he's hungry. Give him a lever that produces food pellets at random intervals, and he'll keep pressing it forever.

How does society get better at preserving privacy online? As Lawrence Lessig pointed out in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, there are four possible mechanisms: norms, law, code, and markets.

So far, we've been pretty terrible on all counts. Take norms: our primary normative mechanism for improving privacy decisions is a kind of pious finger-wagging, especially directed at kids. "You spend too much time on those Interwebs!" And yet schools and libraries and parents use network spyware to trap every click, status update, and IM from kids, in the name of protecting them from other adults. In other words: your privacy is infinitely valuable, unless I'm violating it. (Oh, and if you do anything to get around our network surveillance, you're in deep trouble.)

What about laws? In the United States, there's a legal vogue for something called "Do Not Track": users can instruct their browsers to transmit a tag that says, "Don't collect information on my user." But there's no built-in compliance mechanism—we can't be sure it works unless auditors descend on IT giants' data centers to ensure they aren't cheating. In the EU, they like the idea that you own your data, which means that you have a property interest in the facts of your life and the right to demand that this "property" not be misused. But this approach is flawed, too. If there's one thing the last 15 years of Internet policy fights have taught us, it's that nothing is ever solved by ascribing propertylike rights to easily copied information.

There's still room for improvement—and profit—in code. A great deal of Internet-data harvesting is the result of permissive defaults on how our browsers handle cookies, those bits of code used to track us. Right now, there are two ways to browse the Web: turn cookies off altogether and live with the fact that many sites won't work; or turn on all cookies and accept the wholesale extraction of your Internet use habits.

Browser vendors could take a stab at the problem. For a precedent, recall what happened to pop-up ads. When the Web was young, pop-ups were everywhere. They'd appear in tiny windows that re-spawned when you closed them. They ran away from your cursor and auto-played music. Because pop-ups were the only way to command a decent rate from advertisers, the conventional wisdom was that no browser vendor could afford to block pop-ups by default, even though users hated them.

The deadlock was broken by Mozilla, a nonprofit foundation that cared mostly about serving users, not site owners or advertisers. When Mozilla's Firefox turned on pop-up blocking by default, it began to be wildly successful. The other browser vendors had no choice but to follow suit. Today, pop-ups are all but gone.

Cookie managers should come next. Imagine if your browser loaded only cookies that it thought were useful to you, rather than dozens from ad networks you never intended to interact with. Advertisers and media buyers will say the idea can't work. But the truth is that dialing down Internet tracking won't be the end of advertising. Ultimately, it could be a welcome change for those in the analytics and advertising business. Once the privacy bargain takes place without coercion, good companies will be able to build services that get more data from their users than bad companies. Right now, it seems as if everyone gets to slurp data out of your computer, regardless of whether the service is superior.

For mobile devices, we'd need more sophisticated tools. Today, mobile-app marketplaces present you with take-it-or-leave-it offers. If you want to download that Connect the Dots app to entertain your kids on a long car ride, you must give the app access to your phone number and location. What if mobile OSes were designed to let their users instruct them to lie to apps? "Whenever the Connect the Dots app wants to know where I am, make something up. When it wants my phone number, give it a random one." An experimental module for Cyanogenmod (a free/open version of the Android OS) already does this.

Far from destroying business, letting users control disclosure would create value. Design an app that I willingly give my location to (as I do with the Hailo app for ordering black cabs in London) and you'd be one of the few and proud firms with my permission to access and sell that information. Right now, the users and the analytics people are in a shooting war, but only the analytics people are armed. There's a business opportunity for a company that wants to supply arms to the rebels instead of the empire.

And it's for that reason that privacy advocates in both Europe and the USA are up in arms about the new facial recognition technology. What seems harmless at first - the ability to identify your friends in photos - could be something much more dangerous in the hands of anyone else other than your friends for one simple reason: your face is the key to linking your online and offline identities. It's one thing for law enforcement officials to have access to this technology, but what if your neighbor suddenly has the ability to snoop on you?

The researchers at Carnegie Mellon showed how a combination of simple technologies - a smart phone, a webcam and a Facebook account - were enough to identify people after only a three-second visual search. Hackers - once they can put together a face and the basics of a personal profile - like a birthday and hometown - they can start piecing together details like your Social Security Number and bank account information.

And the Carnegie Mellon technology used to show this? You guessed it - it's based on PittPatt (for Pittsburgh Pattern Recognition Technology), which was acquired by Google, meaning that you may soon be hearing the Pitter Patter of small facial recogntion bots following you around any of Google's Web properties. The photo in your Google+ Profile, connected seamlessly to video clips of you from YouTube, effortlessly linked to photos of your family and friends in a Picasa album - all of these could be used to identify you and uncover your private identity. Thankfully, Google is not evil.

Imagine a complete stranger taking a photo of you and immediately connecting that photo to every element of your personal identity and using that to stalk you (or your wife or your daughter). It happened to reality TV star Adam Savage - when he uploaded a photo to his Twitter page of his SUV parked outside his home, he didn't realize that it included geo-tagging meta-data. Within hours, people knew the exact location of his home. Or, imagine walking into a store, and the sales floor staff doing a quick visual search using a smart phone camera, finding out what your likes and interests are via Facebook or Google, and then tailoring their sales pitch accordingly. It's targeted advertising, taken to the extreme.

Which is not to say that everything about facial recognition technology is scary and creepy. Gizmodo ran a great piece explaining all the "advantages" of being recognize onlined. (Yet, two days later, Gizmodo also ran a piece explaining how military spies could track you down almost instantly with facial recognition technology, no matter where you are in the world).

Which raises the important question: Is Privacy a Right or a Privilege? Now that we're all celebrities in the Internet age, it doesn't take much to extrapolate that soon we'll all have the equivalent of Internet paparazzi incessantly snapping photos of us and intruding into our daily lives. Cookies, spiders, bots and spyware will seem positively Old School by then. The people with money and privilege and clout will be the people who will be able to erect barriers around their personal lives, living behind the digital equivalent of a gated community. The rest of us? We'll live our lives in public.

Personal comment:

Again, this reminds me of this previous "| rblg" post concerning "publicy". And as I mentioned at that time, it could also be useful in the context of a new work we are working on, Paranoid Shelter. There are .

Friday, May 27. 2011

We, the digiboriginals, perceive a state of hostility towards cyberspace that reached a climax at the eG8. The neutrality on which our values are grounded have been strongly challenged under a false pretext. We have reached the point where the Internet must be protected from governments.

We have shaped a province far removed from culture into a vibrant city, whose wealth benefits all. We built cyberspace. We have built it bit after bit, manifesto after manifesto, lolcat after lolcat. There, we have our cathedrals and our bazaars. We have invented worlds, networks of social and informational systems that are second to none.

The cyberspace is not a new space to conquer. It does not exist to be colonized nor civilized.

The cyberspace is a space of civilization, and has been since its founding. This is an undeniable fact, because it is built and inhabited by men and women.

The Internet does not discriminate between Joe and Mark. It is not an egalitarian space. It breaks through barriers, yet these barriers were socially constructed. They are not in the network’s architecture.

We oppose the cyberspace changing into a space of surveillance.

We oppose states abandoning the protections they own their citizens.

We oppose states violating the right to privacy in the cyberspace.

We oppose modifying cyberspace’s architecture.

We oppose outdated copyright models becoming the norm for everything we share.

At a time when the end of humanity becomes a tangible hypothesis, more than ever we need a commons space where we can gather and solve the issues at hand. The cyberspace makes Tahrir squares and Puerta del Sol possible.

Friday, May 06. 2011

The data entered by millions of social-network users could be turned into revealing infographics.

By Christopher Mims

Ever wondered just how much coffee you drank last year, or which movies you saw, and when? New Web and mobile apps make it possible to track, and visualize, this personal information graphically, and the trend could be set to expand dramatically.

This is because Facebook recently acquired one of the leading personal-data-tracking mobile apps and hired its creators. The social-networking giant could be gearing up to offer users ways to chart the minutiae of their lives with personalized infographics.

Nick Felton and Ryan Case, two New York-based designers, have pioneered turning the mundane contours of an everyday life into a kind of visual narrative. Each year, Felton publishes an "annual report" on his own life: an infographic that charts out his habits and lifestyle in great detail.

Felton and Case have also created a mobile app, called Daytum, that lets users gather personal data and represent it using infographics. Daytum already has 80,000 users, whose pages provide a detailed snapshot of everything from coffee drinking habits to baseball stadium visits. The app gives users the ability to easily record their own information, whatever it might be, and display it in an attractive manner, whether or not they are a designer.

Daytum is part of a larger trend in tracking personal information. But traditional personal tracking applications tend to revolve around medical data, sleep schedules, and the like. In Felton's creative visualizations, even something as mundane as how many concerts he attended in the past year becomes a kind of art. "I think there's storytelling potential in data," he says.

Felton says he can't talk about what he'll be doing at Facebook, but says, "Clearly, companies like Facebook recognize the value of the kind of work we were doing."

At Facebook, users already engage in countless acts of data entry, so it's possible that the data Felton will be visualizing will already be available. Automated data gathering through smart phones—especially location data—provides even more data to mine.

Eventually—with users' permission—this kind of personal information could be mined by marketers and advertisers. Ted Morgan, CEO of the geolocation software company Skyhook, compares the trend to the way advertisers currently track some TV viewers' watching habits. In the future, he says, tracking data will be "like a Nielsen rating box for your life. It will track where you go and what you do. [Advertisers are] going to pay people to do this."

One company is already exploring this possibility. Locately offers users promotions and discounts if they agree to opt in to its mobile data-gathering network. This lets the company gather data on where people go, what they do, and what they buy; the company sells that data to businesses who want to use it for market research and advertising.

Gathering detailed personal data can produce surprising insights, says Felton. "The way people describe themselves is not really in line with their true behavior," he notes. For example, users who track what TV shows they actually watch may find that they spend more time on shows they don't identify as their favorites.

Perhaps this could lead to a whole new kind of friend discovery, one based not on our expressed interests, but on our actual interests. Picture a beefed-up version of Facebook's "people you might also know" feature informed not just by who you're connected to, but what behavior you have in common.

"It could be shared affinities that are not recognized by either [party]," says Felton. The downside, of course, is that people who are a lot like us often drive us crazy. "You might hate them," says Felton. "Isn't that part of what annoys us about our families?"

fabric | rblg

This blog is the survey website of fabric | ch - studio for architecture, interaction and research.

We curate and reblog articles, researches, writings, exhibitions and projects that we notice and find interesting during our everyday practice and readings.

Most articles concern the intertwined fields of architecture, territory, art, interaction design, thinking and science. From time to time, we also publish documentation about our own work and research, immersed among these related resources and inspirations.

This website is used by fabric | ch as archive, references and resources. It is shared with all those interested in the same topics as we are, in the hope that they will also find valuable references and content in it.